Deepa Bhasthi interview: ‘AI can never capture silence between words, produce literary work’

Bhasthi is best known for her distinctive philosophy of “translating with an accent.” In this interview to The Federal, we explore her deeply instinctive approach to translation, and her enduring commitment to keeping the soul of South Indian storytelling alive. Excerpts from interview:

In your translation of Heart Lamp, you chose to retain specific South Indian idioms rather than adapting them into native English equivalents. Why did you choose to keep these local markers instead of making them more accessible to a larger audience?

I didn’t see the point in erasing the culture. If my only goal was to convey ‘meaning,’ I would have used standard English idioms. But, for me, translation is about showing the reader how people who live and speak in Kannada see the world. Every language offers a unique lens. For instance, the English say, “The grass is greener on the other side.” In Kannada, we say, “Doora thappatta munnage” — the distant mountain looks smooth. It’s a beautiful, specific way of looking at a universal feeling. By keeping these phrases, I am carrying the ‘linguistic culture’ across. You cannot profess to carry a culture if you leave out the idioms that define its soul.

Tamil-Sri Lankan writer Muthulingam once said that about 30% of a book’s essence is ‘lost during translation’. How do you feel about the shift toward direct translations and the argument that something is always lost?

I’m not a fan of the ‘lost in translation’ argument. It focuses on the 20% that is missing rather than the 80% that is gained. Because of translation, a reader on the other side of the world can access a story from Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. That is a massive cultural gain.

Of course, translating between Kannada and English is harder than translating between two Dravidian languages because there are fewer equivalents, but it results in something completely new. We don’t know what was ‘lost’ in Tolstoy or Gabriel García Márquez, yet we are infinitely richer for having read them. If you’re only going to focus on what is lost, don’t get the work translated at all.

AI has advanced rapidly, moving from a novelty to a tool that can summarise PDFs or generate storyboards in seconds. How do you see AI assisting — or threatening — your work as a writer and translator?

I’ll be honest: I hate it. It irritates me. AI might translate a set of stories in two minutes that would take me a year, but it will never produce literary work. AI can handle a press release or a business statement because those are about information.

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Literature is about the space between words and the silence between lines. A machine cannot replicate the personal experience that a human brings to a text. AI-translated books might be a trend, like NFTs, but they won’t hold up in cultural history. I’d rather have AI do my laundry and my dishes than write the books I read.

Kannada and Tamil are both Dravidian languages, but we often see political friction regarding which is older or ‘greater.’ Where do you draw the line in these debates?

I view those as political gimmicks for prime-time news. Whether a language is 500 or 1,500 years older doesn’t make it better. That’s just bragging rights. What matters is what we are doing with the language today. Are we pushing boundaries?

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Look at Malayalam; it’s a younger language compared to Tamil or Kannada, but the experimentation happening in their literature and cinema right now is extraordinary. We should focus on the richness of the work being produced now rather than just sitting back and brandishing our age.

You’ve captured various Kannada accents and nuances in your work. How do you handle the flattening that often happens when regional dialects are translated into English?

Kannada isn’t just one language; the Kannada of Gulbarga (now Kalaburagi) is worlds apart from the Kannada of Bangalore. While I can’t always capture every nuance — especially if I don’t intimately know the specific sub-culture — I try to retain the fragrance of it. I do this by keeping specific proverbs or glossing them rather than replacing them. English is a flexible, welcoming language; it has room for these foreign influences if we are brave enough to leave them in.

Your book touches on the lives of women. Many working women still carry a sense of guilt regarding their families. Do you see this changing?

That’s a question for the men. This ‘guilt’ is a product of social conditioning and patriarchy. Why is it a woman’s responsibility to do it all? We shouldn’t applaud men for doing the bare minimum like cooking or cleaning. My husband cooks, and I don’t give him a standing ovation for it — it’s just contributing to the household. Things are changing within some homes, but as a society, we still have a long way to go to stop treating basic partnership as something extraordinary.

Some might look at the Islamic practices in your book and see them as uniquely oppressive. How do you respond to the idea that fundamentalism is ‘worse’ for women in that community?

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that these issues are restricted to the Muslim community. Domestic abuse, sexual abuse, men leaving wives because they don’t birth sons, or men seeking younger wives — these stories happen in every community.

I chose these stories because of their universality. The characters have Muslim names, but their experiences are ones that women of all backgrounds — cousins, friends, neighbours — can relate to. I refuse to burden just one religion with the weight of patriarchy when it is a universal struggle.